Edinburgh Festival Day 6 & 7: Shock? Horror? Outrage? Or just another piece in the puzzle?

Every Festival throws up stunts sick, shocking or weird. There was the Yugoslav company who put their audience under the stage with their heads poking up through holes in the boards while the performers ran around on top with swords and flaming torches. The Fire Officer soon brought the curtain down on that. The there were the near-naked Japanese performance artists who hung upside down from the National Museum of Scotland. And then the Hungarian actress clad only in rags and mud who sweated out a show inside a sealed perspex box until her air ran out. The gross show this year was intended to be the Jim Rose Circus Sideshow, at the Acropolis on Calton Hill, with its nipple-wrenching, foreskin- stretching, insect-eating (right) torture acts. Wherever it has gone it has been rewarded with appalled headlines. But was Edinburgh gagging? Not a bit of it. After the Sideshow's professional vomiter had completed his piece, one member of the audience strolled on stage and downed a pint of freshly regurgitated lager and tomato sauce.

(Photograph omitted)